Pretty image from LHC Beam Dump

This is an image of the beam at the Large Hadron Collider ("LHC," at CERN) as it is ejected from the ring and hits the beam dump. The redder the color, the more protons have hit the detector.

There are 25 individual bunches of protons, with about 80 billion (8E10) protons in each bunch. They are in a sprial because the beam dump cannot dissipate the enbergy of the beam unless they specifically and carefully spread out the individual bunches like this.

The beam dump system is one of the more elegant systems in the LHC. An overview can be found here.